Travel and Tourism in Czech Republic

Regions and Cities

Things to See and Do

The Czech Republic offers an almost bewildering range of attractions that extend well beyond its famous castles and churches. The country has approximately 2,000 castles and castle ruins, more per capita than virtually any other country in Europe, and many of them are accessible and open to visitors during the spring, summer, and autumn months. Konopiste Castle near Benesov, the last residence of Archduke Franz Ferdinand before his assassination in Sarajevo, contains extraordinary collections of hunting trophies and armories that reveal the obsessions of the man whose death triggered World War One. Cesky Sternberk Castle, owned by the same noble family since the thirteenth century without interruption, rises from a sheer cliff above the Sazava River in a setting so dramatic it appears to belong to fiction. Krivoklat Castle in the Berounka river valley, a royal hunting castle associated with Charles IV among others, is one of the best-preserved medieval castles in Bohemia and contains a remarkable Gothic chapel.

The bone church at Sedlec near Kutna Hora, formally the Ossuary of the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady and Saint John the Baptist, deserves special mention as one of the most singular attractions in all of Europe. Artistic arrangements made entirely of the bones of approximately 40,000 to 70,000 individuals, including a chandelier said to contain at least one of every bone in the human body and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms rendered in skeletal material, fill the small Gothic chapel in an installation that manages to be simultaneously gruesome and strangely beautiful.

Outdoor recreation occupies a significant portion of Czech life throughout the year. Rock climbing in Bohemian Switzerland and the sandstone towers of the Hruboskalsko rock city north of Turnov, white-water kayaking and canoeing on the Vltava, Otava, Sazava, and Berounka rivers, mountain biking on trails throughout the Beskydy and Sumava ranges, and skiing at Spindleruv Mlyn, Harrachov, Pec pod Snezkou, and other Krkonose resorts are all well-developed pursuits. Fishing in Czech rivers and reservoirs, hunting in the managed forests and game preserves of Bohemia and Moravia, and thermal spa bathing in western Bohemia represent a further range of activities that draw dedicated enthusiasts.

Musical life in the Czech Republic is active and internationally respected, stemming from the extraordinary heritage of classical composition that the country produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Prague Spring International Music Festival, held annually in May, opens on the anniversary of Smetana's death with a performance of Ma vlast by the Czech Philharmonic and continues for three weeks with leading orchestras and soloists from around the world. The Brno Philharmonic, the Moravian Philharmonic in Olomouc, and opera houses in Prague, Brno, Olomouc, and Ostrava maintain full performing seasons of high artistic quality. The Janacek Opera Festival in Brno celebrates the composer's legacy with productions of his rarely performed works alongside the international operatic repertoire.

Jazz has deep roots in Czech musical culture dating from the interwar period, when Prague was one of the liveliest jazz scenes in Europe. Contemporary jazz venues in Prague, Brno, and other cities support a healthy community of Czech musicians who blend jazz tradition with folk, classical, and electronic influences. The Prague Jazz Festival and the Bratislava Jazz Days, easily accessible from the Czech side of the former federation, attract international headliners each autumn.

Theater and cinema maintain the Czech tradition of dark humor, absurdist vision, and political satire that characterized the work of Vaclav Havel, Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel, and other artists who emerged from the Communist-era underground. The Black Light Theatre and Laterna Magika companies in Prague offer visually spectacular productions that communicate across language barriers, while the National Theatre presents Czech and international repertoire to mixed audiences. Czech animation, pioneered by Jiri Trnka and later by Jan Svankmajer, continues to produce work of international distinction, and the country's film industry has created several internationally acclaimed films in recent decades.

National Parks and Nature

The Czech Republic maintains four national parks and a broader network of protected landscape areas that together cover a significant portion of the country's territory and protect ecosystems ranging from alpine meadows to ancient peatbogs, temperate rainforest remnants, and karst cave systems of extraordinary scientific and visual interest.

Bohemian Switzerland National Park, established in 2000 in the northwestern corner of Bohemia, is the youngest and most dramatically scenic of the four parks. Its defining character comes from the Elbe Sandstone geological formation, a series of horizontally deposited sandstone layers that erosion has carved into towers, arches, gorges, and labyrinthine rock cities of a kind found on this scale only in a few places on earth. The Pravicka Brana arch, the Edmundova Soutesk? gorge navigable by boat, and the views from the Prebraz plateau over the Elbe valley toward Saxony represent the park's most celebrated sights. The park shares a continuous protected landscape with the Saxon Switzerland National Park across the German border, and hiking trails cross freely between the two countries through forest and sandstone terrain.

Krkonose National Park, established in 1963 and the oldest in Bohemia, protects the highest mountain range in the Czech Republic. The Krkonose, or Giant Mountains, rise to 1,603 meters at Snezka, a summit shared with Poland and accessible by gondola from the Czech side. The park protects an exceptional diversity of alpine and subalpine habitats including peat bogs, glacial cirques, and the Giant Mountains' unique alpine meadows with endemic plant communities. Rare species including the lynx, eagle owl, and black grouse inhabit the park, and the range of walking trails spans from gentle valley routes to challenging ridgeline treks. Winter brings a substantial skiing season, with Spindleruv Mlyn and Pec pod Snezkou among the largest Czech ski resorts.

Sumava National Park in southwestern Bohemia is the largest protected area in the country, covering around 680 square kilometers of the Bohemian Forest along the borders with Germany and Austria. The landscape of rolling hills, peat bogs, glacial lakes, and ancient spruce-beech forests represents what Central European wilderness looked like before centuries of human modification. The Sumava peat bogs, some dating back more than 9,000 years, are among the most pristine in Central Europe and serve as critical carbon reservoirs. Lakes Lipno and Certovo are glacial lakes of exceptional purity. The park has periodically been a subject of controversy regarding the management of bark beetle infestation, with competing arguments between those favoring intervention to protect timber and those supporting a non-intervention approach to allow natural forest dynamics to reassert themselves. The non-intervention zones have in fact produced some of the most ecologically valuable old-growth forest regeneration anywhere in Central Europe.

Podyj? National Park in the far south of Moravia, along the Austrian border, follows the deeply incised valley of the Dyje River through a terrain of extraordinary biodiversity. The park protects the most extensive fragment of original river valley landscape in Central Europe, with oak and hornbeam forests, limestone grasslands, and rocky outcrops supporting more than 1,500 plant species. The adjacent Austrian Thayatal National Park creates a cross-border protected zone of impressive scale.

Beyond the national parks, the Czech Republic maintains twenty-six Protected Landscape Areas covering more extensive territories where traditional land use and biodiversity conservation are balanced. The Moravian Karst Protected Landscape Area north of Brno encompasses the cave systems already mentioned along with limestone plateaus, dry valley forests, and populations of rare bat species in the cave systems. The White Carpathians Protected Landscape Area along the Moravian-Slovak border is recognized as one of the most biodiverse landscapes in Central Europe outside the Alps, with traditional flower-rich hay meadows hosting dozens of orchid species and butterfly communities of outstanding richness.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites

The Czech Republic has accumulated one of the most impressive UNESCO World Heritage rosters in Central Europe, with seventeen properties inscribed on the World Heritage List as of the time of writing. These sites span more than a millennium of human achievement in architecture, urban planning, landscape design, and cultural tradition, and together they represent a remarkably comprehensive survey of European civilization in miniature.

The Historic Centre of Prague was inscribed in 1992, among the very first Czech sites to receive this recognition, and it remains the most visited and internationally celebrated of all Czech heritage properties. The inscription encompasses the ensemble of five historic towns that merged administratively over the centuries but retain their distinct urban characters: the Old Town, the New Town, the Lesser Town, Hradcany with the castle district, and the Jewish Town. The property encompasses nearly 900 historic buildings within an area of approximately 866 hectares, and the Outstanding Universal Value recognized by UNESCO derives from the exceptional concentration of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Classicist, Empire, Art Nouveau, and Cubist architecture representing a continuous urban development across a thousand years with remarkably little destruction. The intactness of the ensemble, itself partly a consequence of the fact that Prague escaped major bombing during World War Two, is what makes it so extraordinarily valuable as a heritage asset.

The Historic Centre of Cesky Krumlov was also inscribed in 1992, reflecting the immediate recognition of this southern Bohemian town's exceptional preservation. The castle complex and the medieval town below it together represent one of the best-preserved small town ensembles in Central Europe, with urban and architectural fabric dating primarily from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the Rosmberk and later Schwarzenberg families transformed it into a Renaissance and Baroque showpiece. The extraordinary Baroque Theater within the castle, with original stage machinery, costumes, and sets dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still largely intact and functional, is regarded as one of the most important surviving examples of Baroque theatrical culture anywhere in Europe.

The Historic Centre of Telc, inscribed in 1992, showcases a perfectly preserved Renaissance square of Italian inspiration in the southern Moravian town of Telc. The elongated main square, Namesti Zachariase z Hradce, is lined on three sides with arcaded Renaissance burgher houses of unusual uniformity and quality, the result of a rebuilding program initiated after a fire in the sixteenth century by the lord of Telc, Zacharias of Hradec, who brought Italian architects and craftsmen from Genoa to design the reconstruction. The castle at one end of the square, also transformed in Renaissance style, and the fish ponds that nearly surround the historic island town create an ensemble of extraordinary completeness and aesthetic coherence.

The Pilgrimage Church of St. John of Nepomuk at Zelena Hora, inscribed in 1994, stands at the edge of the town of Zdar nad Sazavou in the Bohemian-Moravian Highland and represents one of the most original and spiritually powerful works of Baroque architecture in Central Europe. Designed by the eccentric Czech Baroque architect Jan Blazej Santini-Aichel, who developed a highly personal synthesis of Gothic structural forms with Baroque spatial drama known as Baroque Gothic, the church was built between 1719 and 1722 to honor the newly beatified St. John of Nepomuk, a fourteenth-century Czech martyr priest drowned in the Vltava by order of King Wenceslas IV. The church's five-pointed star plan, its integration with the surrounding pentagonal cloister, and the complex symbolic geometry of the entire design reflect both Baroque theological thinking and Santini's singular architectural imagination.

Kutna Hora: Historical Town Centre with the Church of Our Lady at Sedlec and Sedlec Cemetery, inscribed in 1995, encompasses a medieval silver mining city that was briefly the second richest city in Bohemia after Prague. The wealth generated by the Kutna Hora silver mines from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries paid for extraordinary Gothic architecture, most notably the Cathedral of St. Barbara, patron saint of miners, one of the finest late Gothic churches in Central Europe with buttressed nave soaring above the valley and an interior of remarkable spatial complexity. The Church of Our Lady at Sedlec, originally part of a Cistercian monastery and later redesigned by Santini in his Baroque Gothic idiom, and the Ossuary described in the Things to See and Do section, complete the UNESCO inscription with their own distinct architectural and historical significance.

The Lednice-Valtice Cultural Landscape, inscribed in 1996, covers an extraordinary area of approximately 283 square kilometers in southern Moravia along the Austrian border, where the Liechtenstein noble family created one of the largest landscape parks in Europe over the course of three centuries from the seventeenth to the nineteenth. The landscape contains two major palace complexes, Lednice Castle in Neo-Gothic style and Valtice Palace in Baroque style, connected by a network of avenues, water features, artificial lakes, and more than thirty architectural follies including minarets, Roman ruins, Gothic chapels, a Roman triumphal arch, and a hunting lodge, all set within a designed landscape of exceptional scale and ambition. The interiors of both palaces and the managed fish ponds that characterize the broader landscape contribute to an inscription that is among the most expansive in the Czech Republic.

The Gardens and Castle at Kromeriz, inscribed in 1998, showcase perhaps the finest Baroque garden complex in Central Europe, located in the Moravian city of Kromeriz that served as the residence of the Bishops and later Archbishops of Olomouc. The Flower Garden, designed in the seventeenth century with a long axial path and circular central parterre surrounded by elaborate arcaded colonnade and trellised garden structures, is an exceptional example of Baroque garden design preserving much of its original character. The Episcopal Palace contains significant art collections including a famous portrait attributed to Titian. The Archbishop's Palace park adjacent to the town center completes the inscribed property.

Holasovice Historical Village Reservation, inscribed in 1998, preserves a remarkably complete example of a South Bohemian village with buildings in the South Bohemian Folk Baroque style, a distinctive regional architectural tradition that applied Baroque decorative principles to farmhouse facades in a way unique to this part of Central Europe. The village of Holasovice, not far from Ceske Budejovice, was depopulated when its German-speaking inhabitants were expelled after World War Two and subsequently resettled with Czech families, a process that paradoxically contributed to the preservation of its historic built fabric by preventing modernization. The village represents not only architectural but also social historical significance as a document of Central European rural life.

Litomysl Castle, inscribed in 1999, is a late Renaissance arcaded castle in the eastern Bohemian city of Litomysl, birthplace of composer Bedrich Smetana. The castle, built between 1568 and 1581 for the Pernstein family, is distinguished by the quality and completeness of its Renaissance sgraffito decoration covering virtually the entire exterior, a technique of creating decorative patterns in contrasting plaster layers that was brought to Bohemia from Italy. The castle brewery in the basement represents a rare intact example of a Renaissance-era aristocratic brewery. The music festival held annually in the castle courtyard celebrates Smetana's connection to the city.

The Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc, inscribed in 2000, is a towering sculptural monument erected in the central Horni namesti square of Olomouc between 1716 and 1754 as a votive offering for the end of a plague epidemic. At 35 meters in height, it is the largest concentration of Baroque statuary in Central Europe, incorporating three chapels on three levels with fifty religious sculptures arranged around a central column crowned by a gilded Trinity group. The monument was designed and largely carved by local Olomouc master craftsmen rather than imported artists, and its inscription recognizes it as an outstanding example of Central European Baroque artistic tradition and civic piety.

The Tugendhat Villa in Brno, inscribed in 2001, represents modernist architecture rather than the Baroque and medieval tradition that dominates the rest of the Czech UNESCO list. Built in 1928 to 1930 for the Tugendhat family, a wealthy Brno Jewish textile family, and designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the villa introduced principles of open-plan living, structural steel and glass construction, and the integration of indoor and outdoor space that would define much of twentieth-century domestic architecture. The use of expensive materials including an onyx wall, macassar ebony room divider, and chrome-clad steel columns within a space that opened entirely to the garden through retractable floor-to-ceiling glass walls was revolutionary. The Tugendhat family fled the Nazi regime in 1938, and the villa subsequently served as a stable for horses, a rehabilitation facility, and finally a children's health clinic before its careful restoration in the 2000s and 2010s returned it as close as possible to its original appearance.

The Jewish Quarter and St. Procopius Basilica in Trebic, inscribed in 2003, comprises two distinct elements in the Moravian town of Trebic representing the coexistence and interaction of Jewish and Christian communities in Central Europe. The Jewish Quarter, one of the best-preserved in Central Europe, contains the former ghetto with its characteristic urban fabric of narrow lanes, courtyards, and historic synagogues, along with the Jewish cemetery with thousands of tombstones spanning several centuries. The Romanesque and early Gothic Basilica of St. Procopius, originally part of a Benedictine monastery founded in the twelfth century, demonstrates the architectural sophistication of medieval Moravian religious culture. The joint inscription recognizes the significance of both traditions within a single urban landscape.

The Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe, a transnational natural World Heritage Site first inscribed in 2007 for its core area in Slovakia and Ukraine, was progressively extended to encompass outstanding beech forest remnants across a wider arc of European countries, with the Czech Republic's Sumava beech forests incorporated in the 2017 extension. The Sumava stands represent some of the finest examples of temperate beech forest in Central Europe, characterized by old-growth beech trees of exceptional age and girth, a rich understorey of shade-tolerant plant species, and ecological communities dependent on dead and decaying wood that are increasingly rare in managed forest landscapes. The inscribed Sumava forests contain trees of several hundred years in age, a diversity of woodpeckers, bats, and invertebrates dependent on standing dead timber, and ecological processes of continuous forest succession undisturbed by human management over extended periods. The transnational property, which spans multiple countries across a geographical arc from the Carpathians to the Atlantic coast, represents the Outstanding Universal Value of the most complete and ecologically intact examples of European beech forest, a forest type that once covered much of lowland and montane Europe but has been reduced to fragments by centuries of agricultural clearing and timber exploitation. The Czech inclusion in the 2017 extension recognized the Sumava beech forests as part of this wider story of forest ecology conservation, linking one of the Czech Republic's most ecologically significant landscapes to a pan-European natural heritage narrative that extends from the Ukrainian Carpathians to the forests of northern Spain and the Balkans.

The Landscape for Breeding and Training of Ceremonial Carriage Horses at Kladruby nad Labem, inscribed in 2019, is among the most unusual entries in the Czech UNESCO portfolio, recognizing a living cultural landscape rather than a monument or urban ensemble. The Kladruby nad Labem stud farm on the Elbe plain in eastern Bohemia has been used continuously for the breeding and training of the Kladruber horse, a rare breed developed from Spanish and Italian bloodstock by the Habsburg court as a ceremonial carriage horse, since the late sixteenth century. The landscape encompasses the stud farm buildings, paddocks, water meadows, and the field system that together form a managed environment specifically designed to support the living horse-breeding tradition. The Kladruber remains a living breed used in ceremonial contexts, and the stud farm continues to operate, making this inscription an active cultural tradition rather than a preserved historical artifact.

The Erzgebirge/Krušnoho?í Mining Region, inscribed as a transnational World Heritage Site in 2019 in partnership with Germany, recognizes an exceptional mining cultural landscape straddling the border between northwestern Bohemia and the German state of Saxony. The Ore Mountains, whose very name in both Czech and German derives from the rich metal ores extracted from their depths, witnessed intensive silver, tin, and later uranium mining from the twelfth century through the twentieth century, generating wealth that shaped Central European history and transforming a once-forested mountain range into one of the most dramatically modified mining landscapes in Europe. The inscribed property encompasses historical mining towns including Jachymov on the Czech side, where silver from the Joachimsthal mines gave the world the word thaler and ultimately the word dollar through a chain of currency names; mine workings, shaft headframes, and ore-processing installations spanning eight centuries of continuous extraction; and the remarkable planned urban fabric of towns built to house and serve the mining workforce and its mercantile economy. Jachymov carries additional historical significance as the site where uranium ore was first extracted and where Marie and Pierre Curie obtained the pitchblende from which they isolated radium and polonium, connecting this Bohemian mining town directly to the foundations of nuclear science. The Outstanding Universal Value of the Erzgebirge/Krušnoho?í landscape lies in the density and completeness of mining heritage evidence across both sides of the border, representing the economic, technological, social, and urban history of European metal mining across the full span of its development from medieval hand-working to industrial-scale extraction.

The Great Spa Towns of Europe, inscribed as a transnational World Heritage Site in 2021 across eleven spa towns in seven countries including Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic, recognizes the exceptional cultural phenomenon of the European therapeutic spa town in its heyday from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The Czech contribution to this transnational property is Karlovy Vary, known in German as Karlsbad, the greatest of the western Bohemian thermal resorts and one of the most celebrated spa destinations in European history. The inscribed property encompasses the colonnade walks along the Tepla River where visitors promenade collecting mineral water from twelve different hot springs in their distinctive spa cups, the grand hotel and sanatorium architecture that catered to an international clientele of royalty, aristocracy, artists, and the prosperous bourgeoisie, and the ensemble of Neo-Baroque, Neo-Rococo, and Art Nouveau buildings that constitute the physical expression of spa culture at its most architecturally ambitious. The thermal waters of Karlovy Vary, with temperatures reaching 73 degrees Celsius at the Vridlo spring, were prescribed for metabolic and digestive conditions, and the cure combined drinking promenades, concerts, theater visits, and hydrotherapy baths into a social and medical ritual that defined European leisure culture for two centuries. Historical visitors included Goethe, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Schiller, and Peter the Great of Russia, as well as virtually every European royal house, making Karlovy Vary's guest book an index of continental cultural and political life during its era of greatest renown. The Great Spa Towns inscription recognizes Karlovy Vary alongside Baden-Baden, Bath, Vichy, and other European equivalents as sites whose Outstanding Universal Value reflects the history of medicine, social ritual, urban design, and the idea of health and leisure as a shared civilizational pursuit.

The Historic Town of Zatec and the Landscape of Saaz Hops, inscribed in 2023, honors the oldest and most globally influential hop-growing tradition in the world. The Zatec region of western Bohemia has cultivated hops continuously since at least the twelfth century, and the distinctive aromatic qualities of Saaz hops, recognized in trade documents from the thirteenth century onward, made them the most prized and widely exported hop variety in the world. The inscription encompasses the historic town center of Zatec with its remarkable concentration of historic hop-related architecture including hop gardens, drying towers, and trading and storage facilities, along with the surrounding agricultural landscape where traditional hop cultivation continues. The cultural significance of hops to the region's economy, identity, and built environment is comprehensively reflected in an urban fabric unlike any other in the world.

Festivals and Events

The Czech festival calendar offers something remarkable in virtually every month, from intimate folk music gatherings in Moravian villages to internationally attended classical music events drawing audiences from across the world. The Prague Spring International Music Festival in May is the most prestigious classical event, but many other festivals deserve recognition.

The Colours of Ostrava festival, held in the industrial Moravian city of Ostrava each July in the grounds of a former ironworks, has established itself as one of Central Europe's most respected rock and world music festivals, drawing international headliners to a setting of unusual visual drama against slag heaps and furnaces repurposed as stages and artistic installations. The Pohoda Festival in Slovakia, easily accessible from the Czech side of the former federation, similarly attracts major international acts.

Ride of the Kings is a traditional horse festival unique to the Wallachian and Slovacko regions of Moravia, held in several villages each spring. The ceremony, inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list, involves a young boy dressed as a girl and carried on horseback through the village as a symbolic figure of royalty, accompanied by mounted companions singing traditional verse and collecting offerings from households. The tradition's exact origins are uncertain but may relate to medieval ceremonies protecting the community.

The Moravian folk music tradition finds its greatest annual celebration at the Straze festival in Straze pod Ralskem and at the International Folklore Festival in Straznice, both drawing performers and musicians from across the Czech Republic and neighboring countries in celebrations of traditional song, dance, and costume.

The Mattoni Grand Prix of Karlovy Vary and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in July, the Prague International Jazz Festival in autumn, the Olomouc Baroque festival, the Brno Design Days, and the Plzen European Capital of Culture legacy programming all contribute to a calendar of cultural events of considerable diversity and quality.

Additional Things to See and Do

The Czech Republic's cave systems deserve extended treatment as visitor attractions of international quality. The Moravian Karst north of Brno contains the Punkva Caves with their navigable underground river and dramatic connection to the Macocha Abyss, but other cave systems throughout the country offer equally distinctive experiences. The Kokorinsko protected landscape area north of Prague contains sandstone formations and historic castle ruins. The Adrspach-Teplice Rocks in northeastern Bohemia, a sandstone rock city of towers and labyrinths accessible on marked trails and by rowing boat on the inter-rock lake, offer hiking and climbing in a landscape of otherworldly character. The Zlate Hory region in northern Moravia contains historic gold mining sites that can be toured.

The Czech puppet theater tradition, one of the richest in Europe, traces its origins to the traveling puppet masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who toured the Bohemian and Moravian countryside performing popular stories in Czech at a time when German was the language of the educated classes, making Czech puppet theater a vehicle of both entertainment and cultural resistance. The National Marionette Theatre in Prague and the Divadlo Spejbla a Hurvinka, home of the beloved father-and-son puppet characters created by Josef Skup? in the 1920s, maintain this tradition for contemporary audiences. The Museum of Puppetry in Chrudim in eastern Bohemia documents the full breadth of the Czech puppet heritage.

The Ceský ráj, or Bohemian Paradise, is a protected landscape area north of Prague containing the most extensive concentration of sandstone rock formations in Bohemia, including the dramatic towers of Hrubá Skála and Prachovské skály, medieval castles perched on sandstone columns including Trosky castle with its twin volcanic plugs, and forested hiking country of great beauty. Day trips from Prague are feasible, but the area rewards an overnight stay. The nearby towns of Jicin, Mnichu Hradiste, and Turnov offer comfortable base options.

The Lednicko-valticky areal, combining the UNESCO-listed Lednice and Valtice castles in a single excursion with bicycle touring between the two palaces through the designed landscape, represents one of the most pleasant day activities in southern Moravia. The cycling path through avenues of old linden trees, past artificial lakes and romantic follies, requires only a few hours of leisurely pedaling and provides an experience of landscape architecture at a scale usually encountered only in the greatest English country house parks or French royal gardens.

Additional Festivals and Events Detail

The Five-Petalled Rose Festival in Cesky Krumlov, held each June on the summer solstice weekend, is one of the most visually spectacular historical pageants in Central Europe. The event commemorates the five-petalled rose symbol of the Rozmberk family, the noble dynasty that shaped Cesky Krumlov's character for several centuries, and transforms the castle and historic town center into a living tableau of medieval and Renaissance life. Participants dressed in historically researched period costumes fill the streets and castle courtyards, markets sell period-appropriate food and craft products, jousting tournaments take place in the castle moat area, and the castle Baroque theater stages special performances. The combination of the already extraordinarily beautiful setting and the quality of the historical recreation makes the Five-Petalled Rose Festival arguably the finest of its kind in the Czech Republic.

The Prague Fringe Festival, held each May in the week before the Prague Spring Music Festival, offers a platform for experimental theater, comedy, dance, and physical performance from international and Czech companies at venues throughout the Mala Strana neighborhood. The festival maintains genuine fringe credentials, featuring work that challenges conventional theatrical form, and is accessible to non-Czech speakers through the international character of many participating companies.

The Kutna Hora Baroque Music Festival, held in September in the historic churches and halls of the city, is a smaller but exquisitely curated event bringing period instrument performances of seventeenth and eighteenth-century repertoire to venues of incomparable appropriateness. The acoustics of the Gothic Cathedral of St. Barbara, the Baroque spaces of the Jesuit College, and the intimate Vlasky Dvur courtyard all contribute to performances that are informed by their architectural context in ways impossible to replicate in modern concert halls.